March 2010
2 posts
v. (2)
I go out to smoke a cigarette, standing with bare arms in the snow. I cup my hand around the lighter’s weak flame. A snowflake falls on my index finger as I’m looking at the fire so close to my skin, and for a moment my senses tangle and I’m convinced the snowflake has burnt me… That is an instance of the immaculate, liberated present, during which there is no possible...
v. (1)
Eight million Tesla-coil hearts, flailing electric blue arms, blindly searching the boundaries of their enclosures… but I am concerned with two here… yours and mine, and the way all those violent blue bolts gather calmly where your skin meets the glass, then explode in renewed frenzy when your touch recedes.
January 2010
3 posts
date.
I finally got hit on at Black Rabbit by somebody I don’t know and who is very attractive. She walked up to me, grabbed my phone, dialled her own number on it, walked away, then sent me a text message from the other side of the bar.
doctors without borders
I just donated $50 to Doctors Without Borders, the most efficient relief group now working in Haiti to help earthquake victims and survivors. You should do the same. It’s easy:
http://doctorswithoutborders.org/
Thank you.
December 2009
10 posts
Vetiver - More Of This
it won’t be long...
gone, dear
darling i wander and wandering, grow fonder in fondness i flounder and floundering, i wonder in wonder i squander in squandering, no blunder and blundering, come out - yonder’s my understanding standing, i ponder and pondering, grow fonder darling i wander
her
The heart will ail that for so long starved Is suddenly, recklessly gorged But if fed at the feast loving slowly carved Will find its strength reforged
tremor
I lost the city. The city lost me - lost track of me. The streets were gripped in a grim winter rictus, pinched, constricted, frozen at the bottom end of exhalation - dead and breathless, at the very bottom of outward breath. Cement, marble, glass, rubber, steam, I saw everything disconnected from the rest, piled up in accidental arrangement. People strewn about in maudlin aspects of loneliness...
madness is my easy chair
Wanda is taking laps around the room, her evening constitutional. Upon each knick-knack (we call the room “the museum”) which she’s collected on her nocturnal scavengings she lays an inquisitive gaze, and sometimes a bold hand, if she has discovered a fitter place for it elsewhere. By the end of this exercise every object will have been relocated at least once. I am in the big...
relation/condition
I hope to rescue the mundane from insignificance. This is the insignificance of phenomena dimly felt, indirectly observed, partially experienced. What almost everything must be, if you’re to do more than sit still and watch closely as life occurs around you. You guess and it’s a wonderful expedient to guess that the great portion of human activity hasn’t much to do with you. I...
unfold
One can always disappear into one’s own disbelief, fold up into a state of nonexistence, but to crumple into this origami mock oblivion does not make the soul forget its true dimensions, it merely leaves it with a false topography of shameful wounds and creases.
The Loneliness Artist release party tonight!...
us::them
Michael Moore is a maudlin, whiny caricature; it takes a feat of supreme tolerance to wade through his put-on, sentimental populism to get at what, in the end, may be a decent message. So let us turn instead to more thoughtful words. This is quoted from Bob Herbert’s most recent opinion column in the New York Times:
It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled...
November 2009
10 posts
Among other things...
… I am thankful for my full pack of cigarettes, my coffee shop being open till 2 today, and the shoes that will carry me around the empty city!
yoke
Lumberjacks congratulate you on your manly boots? Tremendous feat! Lumberjacks poke fun at your pansy flip flops? Tree men dis feet!
truth
To the writer, words are not a means of concrete expression, but enigmatic expedients to the great mystery of life. Never believe the writer when he is not writing. Only through fiction is he shamed into truthfulness.
dream ignored
“I don’t know where I found this dream, I mean when and where it was born in me, but I see the face of a beautiful girl, dark hair, very soft skin, but kind of a hard look, or a look of dissatisfaction long sustained, a sentiment that arrived long ago and never left, one that used to be instrumental and advantageous, that must have seemed fashionable at first, then uniquely expressive...
fantastic text message:
“Listening to Belle and Sebastian and thinking of you.”
Keep it up!
in:verse
New York is a place where you blend in to stand out and stand out to blend in.
aaron
I must with the same breath curse and bless the modern condition that drives me to such rigorous asceticism. Without so prevalent an epidemic of mindlessness and devotion to technology I would not chafe so violently, and seek the peace of solitude, if only to keep from being ill-tempered around friends. Because among these few my grievance goes from moral and aesthetic concern to inarticulate, or...
happiness
“But I believe there comes a point in love, once and no more, which later on the soul seeks - yes, seeks in vain - to surpass; I believe that happiness wears out in the effort made to recapture it; that nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.” Andre Gide, The Immoralist
October 2009
11 posts
face forward
I wander through the awesome autumnal symphony that is Tompkins Square park, the day before Halloween. A fenced-off rectangle of asphalt where skateboarders scuttle and clack, the sounds of a loom weaving summer’s death shroud. Kids riot on the playground, and I am eight years old at the water park in a delirious state of sustained exhilaration: panic, excitement, animal abandon, glimmering...
the search
I can’t be sure exactly what she looks like. Time and obsession have blurred her features. I mean a religious obsession, the deity of her I have erected in my mind is fearsome, I avert my inner eye from its terrible (beautiful) visage, I cringe from it, and from this constant deferment of confrontation, I have come to forget the details of her face. (With our backs to the banalities of life...
0.
“Too many people think, I said to myself, who don’t have the right to. They have not paid for it by the kind of undertaking which makes thinking indispensible to your salvation.” A Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet
A quest for the indispensible: the folly is obvious. What can you lack without knowing it, that you cannot live without? What can you seek that, when you find it,...
day.
I spent the entire day wandering, walking up and down the streets of Brooklyn in the rain, and the not-rain, and the not-quite rain. I wore my jacket and a backpack, and I walked - walked everywhere. My feet were tired and then they weren’t. My legs were numb and then they weren’t. The sky was always gray, with sine waves and parabolas marking the darker clouds from the light, and...
tards.
Walking behind two white guys in my neighborhood, I overheard:
“If you ever see a black guy and a white guy walking together in New York City, they’re either cops or gay.”
Fail.
past due
Teen Mobile presents the new Polanski International wireless plan: free long distance, and no Roman charges!
pen pal
Dear ———,
… I can see how you are sensitive, open, and perceptive to your environment, and, like me, are chameleonic with your surroundings. I find my mind taking on the characteristics of the atmosphere, frantic if it’s that, or tranquil, or precise, or vague. But I relish tranquility more than anything, when I can finally manage to keep track of my own thoughts,...
morning
I tumble out of the dust and gloom of my apartment onto the sidewalk of Pacific Street. Make a right. The long block to Kingston Avenue is like a warming of the motor, thinking of sitting on the vinyl seats of our old capacious, ornery but reliable ‘77 Grand Safari station wagon, which made the journey from Massachusetts to California carrying a family of five and all their belongings -...
(fr)action
He arrives home brimming with the uncommunicated, the unexpressed, a whole day’s crowding and accumulation of sensations, impressions, events. They’ve been sliding in and out of clarity, arriving, departing, sometimes leaving no trace but a vague itch at the back of the mind. He can now remember maybe 10% of it all, and yet this would be enough to keep him up all night writing -...
Halloween Author Remixes
In the spirit of Halloween and a slow day at the bookshop, I bring you your favorite authors, rendered frightfully new:
REBLOG AND ADD TO THE LIST! Horrordetus Zora Neale Hearse-ton Kate Choppin’ Thomas Pain Richard Fright W. E. B. Dubious Harriet Creature Stowe James Cauldron Scary Shelley Carson McSkullers Raymond Carve-her Organ Pamuk Audrey Coffinegger Ghoulia Child Talon Ginzberg...
September 2009
12 posts
connect.
There is yet the collective goal, the humanity that runs through us and among us, the commonality that allows a word, a line, a paragraph to shine the same wattage light in a thousand, a million heads simultaneously, the wind that carries with it a message, in no known language, unreproducible, and yet immediately comprehended, there is the cement, the asphalt, the gravel, the sand, the grass, the...
frag.
I love the city. I hate the city. The city gives me something to love and something to hate. Even rarer - something that cannot be altered by either of these passionate emotions. Every effort to interact with the city under each banner leaves it unchanged, except only as I conceive it, see it, feel it, dream it. It bears my projections indifferently, like a patient parent who tolerates a...
Bonnie “Prince” Billy - Gulf Shores
...
To my lovely neighbors across the air shaft:
Please stop smacking your children so I can get some sleep.
change
Autumn. A cold tremble in the air. Molecules slow, microbes drift, somehow, while we slept, summer reached its apex and began its descent. That imperceptible millisecond between inhale and exhale. This year, there was no moment between, no holding of breath, no golden stasis. The leaves are about to turn, to blush with anger, denial, then mourning, loss, and the fall. They’ll mattress the...
So why should I lay here naked when it’s...
jke.
Jewish Mafia? Kosher Nostra.
autobibliography
Probably there were more, but this is all I can remember right now of What I’ve Read This Year: The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett The High Window, Raymond Chandler The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler Farewell, My lovely, Raymond Chandler The Lady In The Lake, Raymond Chandler The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler The...
seeya CA
California here I come, right back where I started from. You can’t go home again, but you can’t ever leave, either.
roomination
Home early, full stomach, sober, in bed, reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The single life is sublime.
August 2009
18 posts
patient
Of course, I know I carry this sickness inside me. That it is not the world which threatens to infect me - it’s merely the place where I convalesce, or decay. My constitution is weak. The strong are blind to what I see, deaf to what I hear, and so remain in good health. It doesn’t get to them. I am asked, and ask myself, whether I don’t want to join the hale, oblivious multitude,...